The House That Holds The Music

Muscle Shoals: Low Rhythm Rising, explores how an Alabama community developed a distinctive sound, became a global recording epicenter in the 1960s and 1970s, and continues to inspire music today. The exhibit tells the story of Black and white musicians who found a way to work together at a time when segregation prevailed. Producer Rick Hall and his FAME Recording Studio and the session aces at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio built a home-made approach to cutting music that mattered. As a result, hitmakers from R&B, rock, pop, and country music flocked to this quiet backwater to record, and a new rhythm arose. Exhibit supported by OneLouder.

Roger Miller: Wit, Wisdom, and Wonder, supported by All Access Coach Leasing, is now open. Follow the story of the musical genius whose career earned him both the esteem of entertainment’s elite and the affection of the public.

Kenny Chesney: Living in Fast Forward, presented by Blue Chair Bay Rum, looks at the drive and vision that propelled him to those lofty highs as well as the blur he experienced as everything reached peak intensity. Along the way, he found creative freedom and learned to take time away in the islands to unplug, crucial steps in fashioning a long, varied, and sturdy career that continues to be relevant in the present day.

Country’s Grandest Stage: The Opry at 100  celebrates notable performers and moments in the history of the longest-running radio show in the world, as well as one of the most important radio programs in broadcasting history. 

Clint Black: The Hard Way on Purpose is now open. The exhibit explores the Texan’s journey, from ironworker to country music star, as he charts his course as an artist with both blockbuster appeal and singular authenticity.

This annual exhibit offers a broad look at country music and its place in American culture over the past year, exploring musical developments, artist achievements, and notable events. The latest installment, which will be open through January 2027 in the ACM Gallery, features music and moments from cozy clubs to cavernous arenas.

The new photography exhibit, Grit and Glory: The Photography of Lawson Little, will open Saturday, September 12 in the Museum’s first-floor gallery, which is free and open to the public.

Lawson Little has made memorable images for more than six decades. In Southern California and Nashville, he shot musicians for commercial work and then lingered in the background of local clubs, continuing to photograph on his own time. The exhibit features work split between vivid, often gritty images of Opry stalwarts and honky-tonk lights, and the rising tide of Americana music figures who gave Little new purpose.

One of the best-selling female country singers of the twentieth century, Patsy Cline achieved iconic status following her tragic death at age thirty in 1963. Cline was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1973, and is frequently invoked as a standard for female vocalists, having inspired scores of singers including k. d. lang, Loretta Lynn, Linda Ronstadt, Trisha Yearwood, and Wynonna Judd.

DeFord Bailey was an influential harmonica player in both country music and blues, one of the Grand Ole Opry’s most popular early performers, and country’s first African-American star.

Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn—performing together as Brooks & Dunn—charged onto the country music scene in 1991. They went on to become the best-selling country duo of all time, with forty-one Top Ten hits (including twenty #1s) and two decades of packing concert arenas. They collected a mountain of music-industry honors, including two Grammys, nineteen CMA awards, and twenty-five ACM awards.

Reba McEntire ranks as the most successful female country performer of her generation, and she has been cited as a role model by nearly every successful woman to follow in her wake. She has achieved more than fifty Top Ten singles and more #1 country albums than any other female artist. McEntire has won CMA Female Vocalist of the Year four times and was CMA Entertainer of the Year in 1986. She also has won three Grammy Awards, and in 2018 received the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors for her lifetime of contributions to American culture.

Hank Williams’s legend has long overtaken the rather frail and painfully introverted man who spawned it. Almost singlehandedly, Williams set the agenda for contemporary country songcraft, but his appeal rests as much in the myth that even now surrounds his short life.